SGAG

SGAG started in 2012 when co-founders, Adrian (Xiao Ming) and Karl were bored during class. Apparently, Mcdonalds had just stopped providing curry sauce in Singapore (the horror) and this duo decided to create a meme about it. Before they knew it, the meme went viral on social media. Wanting to do it again, the next opportunity for virality presented itself when a SMRT train broke down. And yet another, when an Ah Lian quarrelled with an auntie over a MRT seat in June 2012.

These hilarious memes led to spikes in their social media follower counts, and SGAG’s organic reach soared. Interestingly, before becoming the humour-machine that we’re familiar with today, Karl and Adrian tried different ways of generating revenue from their newfound popularity. For instance: Selling over 6000 SGAG t-shirts. Thankfully, the startup pivoted back to creating humourous content, after requests from companies looking to be featured started pouring in. Since then, SGAG has changed the way many Singaporeans consume advertising — away from traditionally spammy ads, to branded content that engage consumers & effectively convey the advertising message. This startup currently boasts a reach of over 760,000 Facebook fans and more than 5,000,000 monthly engagements across platforms.


If you’re a fan of SGAG’s content, the perks of working here are clear. We asked Karl, co-founder of SGAG what the culture here is like. “It is what you think it should be. It’s generally very loud, noisy and fun. Some people wear FBT shorts to work. The cast members change into a lot of different outfits on days of shoots. So you’d see a guy wearing a dinosaur costume walking around; a vampire walking around; or people screaming and shouting because they are shooting. There are a lot of weird things going on, which makes it fun & interesting because it’s always so different.”

Another key culture that stood out was their family-like vibe. SGAG employees spend a lot of time together outside of work. For instance, spontaneous carnival visits, movie nights, or foosball & Werewolf games. “There’s always something going on. Someone would organise something, and it’s very ground-up.” Every year, they would also celebrate festivals together — for instance, a massive Xmas party where employees invite their loved ones to the SGAG office for Thanksgiving & mass games like Charades and lip sync battles.

That said, one misconception people have is that SGAG is all fun & games, and they’ll never get fired for underperforming. That’s far from the case. Reality check: SGAG is made up of 3 creative teams of sizes 15, 15, and 5. The small team of 5 produces all the organic content that you see on their platforms — a massive amount of work, while the remaining 2 teams run around 50 client projects concurrently each month. This means the producers on each team manage around 20-25 video shoots concurrently. In Karl’s words, “We are no nonsense when it comes to performance. It’s not a place where you are just here to play, use the free drinks & snacks and just laze around. People who work here are very high performance individuals, so generally they will be working their ass off.”
